Talk:Boarding/@comment-130.234.207.28-20121001004141
To anyone who has trouble boarding regular (manned) enemy ships, here's what I've found to be working. First off, what you will need: Essential equipment: 1. Fire bomb / Small bomb / Any damaging missile weapon 2. At least 2 Rock / Crystal / Mantis crew members 3. Relatively strong shields Important equipment: 1. Healing burst 2. Defense drone mark II 3. Improved sensors (level 2) 4. Weapon pre-igniter augmentation Optional equipment: 1. Any damaging beam/laser/ion weapon 2. Boarding drone 3. Drone recovery / Shield recharge / Weapon reload / FTL jammer augmentations (any of those) 4. Stealth system 5. Upgraded engines During battle: 1. If the enemy ship has a medical bay, disable it ASAP with your bomb/missile. Ion and breach bombs aren't recommended, since those will cause problems later on. If you think your shields alone can't deflect the hostile ship's weapons, redirect power to whatever defensive mechanisms you have available (engines, stealth, drones). This will become cheaper and less risky than disabling the enemy weapons, unless you have advanced ion blasters. 1.1. If the enemy ship has the zoltan energy shields, use whatever damaging beam/laser/ion weapons you have at your disposal to destroy those before sending out the bomb/missile. If you have none, you can just use the bombs/missiles too, though that will be expensive. 1.2. If the enemy ship has a teleporter too and boards your ship first, fend them off and don't disable their med bay yet; the enemies will return to their ship once they're close to dying, which means you can destroy them together with the med bay by timing your bomb/missile correctly. 1.2. If you're using crystal crew members, you can just let them use their lockdown power inside the med bay and let them destroy the bay themselves. If using the crystal cruiser that starts without weapons, do this in the weapon bay first. 2. If the ship didn't actually have a medical bay, just teleport your rock/crystal/mantis crew members to whatever room you like. If it did and you disabled it, teleport them to the destroyed med bay before the hostiles can repair it. 2.1. If you're using fire to disable the enemy med bay, send only rock crew members in, since that fire will consume the med bay and won't go out if everything goes according to plan. Also in this relation it's useful to have level 2 sensors, since you'll need to monitor the progress of the fire to see if it threatens to destroy the ship while your crew is on board (systems destroyed by fire cause 1 hull damage). 3. The hostile crew members will converge onto their destroyed med bay to engage the boarders, so you can just leave them in there. Unless all of the hostile crew are mantis, your boarders should be able to kill at least one or two of them in one go before nearing death themselves (at which point you need to return them to your ship). 3.1. If you have a healing burst, you won't actually need to teleport your crew back before you've taken out all enemies. The healing burst will heal your boarders up to full health even if they're almost dead, and it's recharge is short enough that you can just keep using it over and over. However, remember it uses missiles so don't waste it. 3.2. If the enemy has a drone system and is spawning system repair drones, they will probably be able to repair the med bay before getting killed by your boarders. In this case you will also have to focus on disabling the drone system, possibly with another bomb. Or you could use a boarding drone to create additional distraction. 4. Repeat the first three steps until all of the hostile crew is dead (this should take 2 or 3 runs, if none of the special cases apply). If at any point their weapons/offensive drones become too much for your defenses to handle, you should always have your bombs/missiles unused most of the time so you can use those to disable the hostile weapons/drones if need be. That's pretty much what I did in my run as a Federation cruiser. I used my default mantis & rock crew members to board every single manned ship I encountered. My downfall was an automated scout in sector 5, boasting 3 shield bars, 2 drones and 4 weapons. This was because I didn't actually manage to upgrade my defenses much.